Wednesday, December 03, 2014

He installs a jail broken version of Android (CyanogenMod) which has lots of better privacy stuff built in

He uses Cryptocat to have sensitive real-time communications

He uses PGP for email (full disclosure - it was Cory that finally prompted me some years ago to dust off my PGP keys)

He tries to use PGP routinely with everyone he knows who has a PGP key hence routine email traffic is all encrypted and any interceptions can't been instantly filtered as the potentially interesting or sensitive ones because they happen to be the only ones encrypted

He uses The Pirate Bay's Peter Sunde's IPREDator proxy service to proxy his traffic especially on untrusted networks

He uses SSL and TLS on his server, craphound.com to allow him to communicate with it securely and the same with boingboing

All his passwords are very long, randomly generated strings; ideally 128 printable characters, all kept on a file separately encrypted on his computer hard drive but nowhere else (apart from a backup). When he needs to enter a password he goes to that file and copies and pastes the passwords but doesn't remember them. He has only one password he can remember - to access the encrypted file of passwords

He has an encrypted hard drive he backs up to at the office and another that he backs up to at home

Things need to be a bit simpler for ordinary people...

He does believe though we have not reached peak surveillance, we may have reached peak indifference to surveillance. So people may now start asking for built in privacy features in technology to a degree that will rein in the dominant surveillance business model of the internet and the surveillance state.

The latest government proposal,
the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill, gives me cause for significant
concern.

The ill-judged Data Retention
and Investigatory Powers Act was, as you know, rushed through as emergency
legislation without proper parliamentary scrutiny in the summer, the week
before MPs went on holiday. The use of the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby
as an excuse for introducing these new measures, expanding DRIPA and the
further expansion of additional surveillance powers, is unconscionable.

With an election round the
corner, we should hardly be surprised that party managers might be encouraging
senior figures to ramp up their “tough on terrorism” rhetoric. However, Lee
Rigby, who dedicated his life to defending the freedoms we enjoy in the UK,
deserves better from our political leaders.

The UK survived two world wars,
the cold war, multiple other military adventures and domestic bombing and
violence orchestrated by groups like the IRA. Yet in the face of small numbers
of violent religious extremists, successive UK governments, in the past 15 years,
have normalised mass surveillance and done more damage to the legal
infrastructure protecting our fundamental freedoms than any collection of
deranged vicious clowns with access to dangerous weapons could do in a
lifetime.

The Counter Terrorism and Security
Bill is unfortunately building further on that trend.

1.It introduces an
obligation on public bodies including universities, schools, nurseries and
councils to prevent terrorism. I've read this section 21 provision of the Bill
repeatedly in the hope of making some sense of it. Yet the truth is, as a
university educator with an interest in law and technology, I have genuinely no
idea of what it is going to mean in practice.

2.It expands the kind
of meta-data that ISPs are being required to hold onto to help identify our IP
addresses. This fundamentally misses the subtlety that an IP address denotes a
device, not a human being.

3.Mobile Phone
companies do not currently log IP addresses because of differences in the
technology to mainline broadband providers. They have been told they have to
find a way. This will cost the taxpayer £100m over 10 years.

4.The problems with
the Bill are much wider than digital rights concerns. It also includes
temporary exclusion orders, banning suspects from Britain for two years, even
if they are British citizens.

5.We are not currently
facing a national emergency, so Parliament should not rush through this kind of
legislation. We need proper scrutiny by MPs, Peers and civil society.

6.The European Court
of Justice (in the Digital Rights Ireland case this year) ruled that blanket
data retention was incompatible with of articles 7, 8 and 52(1) of the Charter
of Fundamental Rights of the EU. New laws should comply with that judgment.
Neither DRIPA nor this proposed new Bill do so.

7.The ECJ said that
there should be a relationship between the data being retained and a threat to
public security. However there are no restrictions to time, place or people in
this Bill.

8.DRIPA is even now
the subject of a legal challenge, brought by the Open Rights Group and Liberty
challenge. It may well be found illegal, while these new provisions are still
being paid for.

Again you will not be surprised,
given our previous correspondence, that I'm of the view that existing mass
surveillance activities and powers need reigning in not expansion. Indeed the
coalition government came to power on a promise of cracking down of the worst
excesses of the previous government's database state. Rather than fulfilling
that promise the current government has normalised and expanded these
operations and powers. I hope when history comes to be written it will not
judge the coalition's performance favourably on that score. Only then will we
be sure that fundamental freedoms, under sustained attack by comparatively tiny
numbers of terrorists and the bulk of the current, often well-intentioned but
scientifically, mathematically and technically illiterate mainstream political
classes, have survived intact.

Instead, the blame seems to have been put decisively on Facebook,
which one of Rigby’s killers apparently used to discuss “killing a
soldier” several months prior to the murder. This despite the fact that
the security services were apparently well aware of the killers and
their motives, independent of their social media presence.

Michael Adebolajo, the controlling mind in the murderous attack on Fusilier Lee Rigby, was first arrested in 2006
at a protest against Danish cartoons he perceived to be insulting to
the prophet Muhammad. By the autumn of 2008, he was on MI5’s radar as
having potential connections with al-Qaeda and by 2011 was the object of
close surveillance.

Between then and April 2013 – when the intensive surveillance of
Adebolajo was cancelled since there was “no indication of a national
security concern” – he had multiple encounters with police and security
services. A month later, Rigby was brutally murdered.

Counter-claims

Adebolajo claims MI5 attempted to recruit him as an informant –
claims the UK government refuses to comment on, citing national security
– and accuses MI6 of tacit complicity in alleged beatings and torture threats
he received when detained by Kenyan police in 2010. He had travelled to
Kenya with the apparent intention of joining extremists in Somalia.

Adebolajo’s partner in the murder, Michael Adebowale, came to MI5’s
attention in August 2011 as a result of his interest in online extremist
material and the intelligence services were aware of the two’s close
connections. They nevertheless eventually considered Adebowale a
low-level threat unworthy of their continuing attention.

By detailing various communications problems between police and
security services and between the various branches of the intelligence
services themselves and the inferences drawn from knowledge of the
activities of Lee Rigby’s attackers, the report does a decent job of
illustrating that security and intelligence systems are imperfect.

We can never be 100% secure, because these systems and agencies can
and do fail – they fail naturally through human and technical and
communications errors and they can be made to fail by actors with malign
and, in this case, murderous intent.

What seems odd about the report and the ensuing media frenzy,
however, is how Facebook has been framed as the single entity that could
have prevented the murder.

Paragraph 17 of the report notes:

We have found only one issue which could have been
decisive. This was the exchange – not seen until after the attack –
between Adebowale and an individual overseas (FOXTROT) in December 2012.
In this exchange, Adebowale told FOXTROT that he intended to murder a
soldier. Had MI5 had access to this exchange, their investigation into
Adebowale would have become a top priority. It is difficult to speculate
on the outcome but there is a significant possibility that MI5 would
then have been able to prevent the attack.

Paragraphs QQ to VV of the recommendations and conclusions go into
this claim in a little more detail, saying: “Adebowale expressed his
desire to murder a soldier “in the most explicit and emotive manner.” It
then criticises US big tech companies for their lack of cooperation
with government on fighting terrorism.

Happy though I usually might be to criticise Facebook or big tech –
if more for their own anti-privacy practices than their lack of
co-operation in counter-terrorism – it’s a bit of a stretch to suggest a
giant beam of enlightenment would have engulfed the security services
if Facebook had only shouted loudly enough, “look at this!”.

They were already aware of extreme views expressed by Adebowale on
the net – and even Adebolajo, considered the more dangerous of the pair,
was providing no continuing indication of a national security concern.

Brazen

For David Cameron and Theresa May to turn the deranged murder of a
young soldier by damaged extremists into a political device for
rehashing discredited surveillance proposals is unconscionable. It’s
also not supported by the report: two members of the ISC have already criticised the notion that their work supports the further expansion of surveillance powers the government is now proposing.

Of course, with an election round the corner, we should hardly be
surprised that party managers might be encouraging senior figures to
ramp up their “tough on terrorism” rhetoric. The sad thing is to see how
the media has uncritically swallowed the “blame Facebook” mantra hook,
line and sinker.

Lee Rigby, who dedicated his life to defending the freedoms we enjoy
in the UK, deserves better from our political leaders, from our media
outlets and frankly, from all of us.